on the second desk, where Aletha sat with her
perpetual loose-leafed volumes before her. The metal smoked and began to
char the desk-top. He picked it up again and tossed it from one gloved
hand to the other.

"There y'are, Ralph!" he boasted. "You Indians go after your coups!
Match this coup for me! Without fuel and minus all equipment except of
our own making--I credit an assist on the mirror, but that's all--we're
set to load the first ship that comes in for cargo! Now what are you
going to do for the record? I think we've wiped your eye for you!"

Ralph hardly looked up. His eyes were very bright. Bordman had shown him
and he was copying feverishly the figures and formulae from a section of
the definition book of the Colonial Survey. The books started with the
specifications for antibiotic growth equipment for colonies with
problems in local bacteria. It ended with definitions of the required
strength-of-material and the designs stipulated for cages in zoos for
motile fauna, subdivided into flying, marine, and solid-ground
creatures: sub-sub-divided into carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores,
with the special specifications for enclosures to contain abyssal
creatures requiring extreme pressures, and the equipment for maintaining
a healthfully re-poisoned atmosphere for creatures from methane planets.

Redfeather had the third volume open at, "Landing Grids, Lightest
Emergency, Commerce Refuges, For Use Of." There were some dozens of
non-colonized planets along the most-traveled spaceways on which refuges
for shipwrecked spacemen were maintained. Small forces of Patrol
personnel manned them. Space lifeboats serviced them. They had the
minimum installations which could draw on their planets' ionospheres for
power, and they were not expected to handle anything bigger than a
twenty-ton lifeboat. But the specifications for the equipment of such
refuges were included in the reference volumes for Bordman's use in the
making of Colonial surveys. They were compiled for the information of
contractors who wanted to bid on Colonial Survey installations, and for
the guidance of people like Bordman who checked up on the work. So they
contained all the data for the building of a landing grid, lightest
emergency, commerce refuge for use of, in case of need. Redfeather
copied feverishly.

Chuka ceased his boasting, but still he grinned.

"I know we're stuck, Ralph," he said amiably, "but it's nice stuff to
go in the records. T